Month: December 2004

Could Turkey be plunged into a fiscal nightmare? Erinc Yeldan, professor in the department of economics at Bilkent University in Ankara and Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington seem to think so. Will this threaten future Turkey accession to the EU?

They note:

But beneath these numbers, a crisis looms. The expansion has been driven by a huge inflow of capital from abroad, $10.9 billion in 2003 (4.6 percent of the economy) and $12.5 billion in just the first eight months of 2004. These are overwhelmingly speculative, short-term inflows – not direct investment, for example, which would expand the country’s productive capacity and create jobs. Foreign direct investment has in fact fallen since 2000. The country is very vulnerable to a serious economic downturn when the inflow of foreign money goes dry.

These kinds of massive speculative capital inflows have a habit of reversing themselves, as they did in Asia in 1997, setting off the Asian financial crisis and a regional depression. In such situations, investors eventually begin to worry about the sustainability of such borrowing and debt. Any number of external events could trigger such an exodus from Turkey: For example, if U.S. and world interest rates rise, as they undoubtedly will from their current historic lows, safe assets like U.S. Treasury securities will become much more attractive.

The influx of speculative money from abroad has also pushed the Turkish currency, the lira, to an overvalued level. This, too, is a bubble waiting to burst. In the meantime it has devastated traditional Turkish industries that are typically labor-intensive by making imports artificially cheap, thus aggravating the unemployment problem. The lira had risen 139 percent against the dollar between 2000-2003.

The country’s public debt is unsustainable at 70 percent of the economy. In order to sustain it presently, the IMF has the government running a primary (excluding interest) budget surplus of 6.5 percent. This is extremely high (compare it with 3.0 percent for Argentina and 4.25 percent for Brazil), and prevents the government from making necessary investments in human capital and infrastructure.

Another devastating part of the IMF program is high interest rates: The Treasury’s debt instruments that are the leading assets in the Turkish financial markets carry an interest rate of 26 percent, still very high at 15 percent in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Compare this with 2 percent in the United States – it is easy to understand why businesses in Turkey are reluctant to borrow and invest in productive capacity.

In short, the policy makers have created an economy that runs on a speculative bubble. It would be nice if a majority of the Turkish people at least got some of the benefits of bubble-driven growth for as long as it lasts. But unfortunately, this has not been the case. Since 2000, the unemployment rate has risen by almost 4 percentage points to 10.5 percent, and real wages have actually fallen.

As Turkey and the European Union continue talks on the possibility of EU accession, the Turkish government should re-examine its unsustainable economic policies of the last five years. Continuing these IMF-supported policies in hopes of garnering credibility with the EU may be dangerous. Ironically, such policies could lead to an economic failure that would actually doom Turkey’s chances for membership.